Open Source Initiative Re-projection with Simon Phipps

"Plenty of people spent time here and on Slashdot throwing rocks at OSI - many deserved - but there's an opportunity to join in to fix things," Phipps said today. "At the last Board meeting I was asked to get a group together to draw up a new, member-led governance charter for OSI."

The issue, as Phipps sees it, is that the OSI was formed in 1998, but a lot has changed since then, and OSI hasn't. The phrase open "source" is becoming a bit of misnomer.

"The growth of cloud computing - even with open APIs and open data - means that liberty assurance mechanisms based only on source code are inadequate to identify the presence of software freedom."

Phipps continued, "And the maturity of the open source market means the 'games' that existing corporations play on the market are sophisticated enough to use open source as a corporate weapon instead of as a path to liberty."

Phipps is the newly elected Director of OSI, and he's asking for your help in making the open source organization relevant again.